Burma Chronicles

by Guy Delisle, translated from the French by Helge Dascher

In previous graphic memoirs, Delisle, a Québécois animator, has documented in spare, whimsical black-and-white line drawings his visits to North Korea and China. Here, he turns his hand to another authoritarian Asian regime, Burma, where he spent a year after the 2004 tsunami with his wife and their infant son. Drawn with charming simplicity and brio, the book mixes traditional travelogue with glimmers of the unexpected, as when Delisle notes that in the local newspaper “some articles contain nothing but a list of officials present at a given event,” or discovers a lit light bulb placed in a drawer to keep paper dry during monsoon season. Delisle takes a whimsical approach but also logs political realities—the increasing difficulty of getting travel permits for humanitarian work, the abrupt banishment of foreign videos from stores. ♦